Real world experience give MBAs the edge

These days you can’t get a job without experience and you can’t get experience without a job.

At Melbourne Business School, an MBA is like a full time job and gives you the best of both worlds with teaching backed by world class faculty and innovative curriculum with “real world” experience employers are looking for through industry practicums and innovation boot camps in Australia and overseas.

Eoin O’Sullivan, 2016 MBA graduate said the experience he received during his time from practicums at Melbourne Business School were second to none.

“There are number of practicums and boot camps throughout the course which are all completely different to one another which ultimately enables you to develop a diverse set of skills at each stage of your MBA,” said Eoin.

“The Innovation Bootcamp tests your ability to develop your own start up in a very short period of time and pitch to a panel of industry heavy weights, similar to how you might pitch a business case to senior leadership team, while the six week practicum at Nab Labs enables you to work in a team of professionals and help identify a solution to a longstanding issue impacting Nab and its customers.”

Students are also given the opportunity to apply what they’ve learnt in the social enterprise consulting practicum which works in partnership with Social Traders, one of Australia’s leading social enterprise development organisations.

Led by Associate Professor of Strategy, Geoff Martin, the practicum pairs MBA students like Eoin O’Sullivan and Varun Wijewardane with a social enterprise start-up, part of the Social Traders network, to help determine the viability of their business case.

“We worked with Nomadic – a start-up that aims to sell sustainable travel products and fundraise to alleviate poverty. It was incredibly inspiring to work with two motivated entrepreneurs like James Burton and Lauren Allnutt. We worked through their business case to give them high level strategic and low level operational advice to ensure that they don’t fall into the trap that many start-ups do - trying to do too much too soon and undervaluing themselves as the drivers of their business,” said Varun.

“The social enterprise practicum is one of the last we do and it is amazing to help make a difference in peoples’ lives and also to realise just how much you’ve learnt throughout the MBA. Our knowledge across a number of areas from finance to strategy and marketing, helped us diagnose the pain points in a social enterprise start up or global organisations across a number of industries in Australia, Asia and beyond,” Varun added.

In addition to practicums, students also get the opportunity to compete on an international stage in global case competitions and experience news ways to learn and challenge themselves.

Earlier this year, two teams of four Melbourne Business School students competed in the HULT prize and the Nespresso Sustainability MBA challenge competition.

Dan Code, Filip Reese, Valentijn Van Gastel and Vanessa Whatmough reached the semi-finals among other leading business schools including INSEAD, NYU Stern School of Business, Said School of Business and more.

Sven Feldmann, Associate Professor of Economics, said the students were one of 15 teams who stood out amongst 85 proposals from universities throughout the world.

“When our students compete on global level they are among the best and while they didn’t win the competition, they each showed great dedication and ability to develop a strong proposal,” said Associate Professor Feldmann.